2013 Shortlist: RTÉ Radio 1’s The John Murray Show Listeners’ Choice Award
The Goldfinch Donna Tartt
The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present-day America and a drama of enthralling power. Combining unforgettably vivid characters and thrilling suspense, it is a beautiful, addictive triumph – a sweeping story of loss and obsession, of survival and self-invention, of the deepest mysteries of love, identity and fate.
Bonkers: My Life in Laughs Jennifer Saunders
Jennifer Saunders’ comic creations have brought joy to millions. From Comic Strip to Comic Relief to Ab Fab, her characters are household names. But it’s Jennifer herself who has a place in all our hearts. This is her funny, moving and frankly bonkers memoir, filled with laughter, friends and occasional heartache – but never misery.
The Rocky Road Eamon Dunphy
For more than thirty years, no commentator on Irish sport, politics and culture has been the object of so much love, hatred and fascination as Eamon Dunphy. Now Dunphy takes us behind the scenes of a passionate life – from childhood poverty in Dublin to the Football League to the forefront of journalism and debate in Ireland.
Staring at Lakes Michael Harding
Throughout his life, Michael Harding has lived with a sense of emptiness – through faith, marriage, fatherhood and his career as a writer, a pervading sense of darkness remained. Here, in this beautifully written memoir, he talks with openness and honesty about his journey and his ultimate acceptance of the importance of now.
Instructions for a Heatwave Maggie O’Farrell
It’s July 1976. In London, it hasn’t rained for months. Robert Riordan tells his wife Gretta that he’s going to buy a newspaper. He doesn’t come back. The search for Robert brings Gretta’s children back home, but none of them suspects that their mother might have an explanation that even now she cannot share.
The Son Philipp Meyer
Part epic of Texas, part classic coming-of-age story, part unflinching portrait of the bloody price of power, The Son is an utterly transporting novel that maps the legacy of violence in the American West through the lives of the McCulloughs, an ambitious family as resilient and dangerous as the land they claim.
